Monthly Archives: July 2012

Below, a photo I recently took in a warehouse roughly 80 km from an inland Chinese city with a population around 8 million people. If it’s not clear in the image, those are televisions. Tens of thousands of scrapped, no-longer-wanted televisions.

So let me ask a question of you, dear reader: based upon the information just given, from which country do you think those scrap televisions originated?

If you are an environmentally aware European or American, your likely answer is … the United States or Europe! After all, two decades of extensive (if often shallow) reporting by journalists and activists have created a very compelling and believable story whereby the developed world “dumps” its so-called e-waste on developing countries like China. It’s a compelling narrative, and one that appeals to the developed world’s outsized need to feel guilty about its presumed effects upon the developing world.

The only problem is: that narrative is no longer the only one available to explain why a warehouse on the outskirts of a major Chinese metropolis is teeming with tens of thousands of televisions (the frame of this photo excludes perhaps another 40% of the inventory present).

In other words: the scrap televisions in this warehouse were all used, and then thrown away, in China. There isn’t an imported – an allegedly dumped – scrap television in the entire lot.

But here’s the important thing: what you see in this warehouse is just a fraction of what’s been generated over the last couple of months in one metropolis in a country that has several dozen of greater size and wealth. You can multiply what you see here by 10,000 and you wouldn’t come close to approximating the number of Chinese-generated waste televisions and other appliances currently being generated, warehoused, and recycled, across China at this very moment. Imported scrap televisions don’t come close to equaling these kinds of volumes.

In Junkyard Planet, my upcoming book with Bloomsbury Press, I’ll explain the process by which these particular televisions are recycled. The technology is Chinese-developed, environmentally secure, and it actually recovers more re-usable metals, plastics, and glass that comparable systems in the so-called developed world. But more than that, it re-writes the very tired, very incorrect narrative that the best means to recycle old televisions, computers and other appliances is to keep them in the developed world at so-called environmentally secure recyclers (“environmentally secure” being a term that developed countries implement and expect developings ones – with less experience and resources – to follow). That’s simply not the case, anymore. China, the world’s second largest consumer of consumer electronics, is very quickly figuring out how to be one of its best recyclers of them. The thousands of televisions in this warehouse are just the start.

This just in: I’ve turned in the manuscript to my first book, Junkyard Planet, to Bloomsbury Press.

It’s a first-person account of the globalizing waste and recycling industry, from the wilds of Fort Wayne, Indiana, to the grimy scrap boomtowns of south China. We’ll laugh, we’ll cry, we’ll visit the machine that recovers most of the change that falls out of US pockets and into the spaces between the cushions of your car (oh yes). But there’s more! We’ll meet some of the men who invented the giant machines that shred old automobiles into fist-sized chunks (and hang out at the giant machines that shred old automobiles into fist-sized chunks); and we’ll follow a couple of e-scrap traders into some of the most notorious so-called dumping zones in the world and find out what’s really going on with your old computers (it’s not even close to what you’ve been told).

Along the way, we’ll get up close and personal with the Chinese tycoons who recognized value in what rich countries throw away, bought it, processed it, and re-sold it back to those rich countries as new products. And we’ll also meet the people who do this work, not because it’s forced upon them, but because – in every country and every place – the collection and recycling of somebody else’s unwanted stuff is often the only route out of poverty, and into a business of one’s own. As just one example – I’ll introduce you to a remarkable dump grubber who started fighting for a living in the trash heaps at age 9, and today runs one of the world’s largest recycling businesses. Those dumps, however, weren’t located in Mumbai, Manilla, or Rio de Janeiro; rather, they were located in the heart of the American Midwest – the heart of what some folks call “The Saudi Arabia of Scrap.”

Junkyard Planet will be released by Bloomsbury Press next year. Below, the tentative Table of Contents as I turned it in last week.

Over the coming weeks and months, I’m going to be re-starting the blog, with a renewed focus on photos, videos, and other extras from Junkyard Planet. I’ll also be editorializing a bit, defending a much-maligned and misunderstood industry. More soon!

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About

Shanghai Scrap is the personal blog of Adam Minter, Shanghai correspondent for Bloomberg World View and author of Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade, forthcoming from Bloomsbury Press. All views expressed here are his own.